There is, I believe, a fundamental misunderstanding as to what exactly a site like Stack Overflow is. It's not a forum; there's no such thing as "your posts." It's more like Wikipedia, as in a collaborative question-and-answer site, or a knowledgebase. Each question and answer can be edited like a mini wiki page. They aren't "yours" any more than the Wikipedia page you created ten years ago is; you contributed it to the commons, so (at least in theory) you don't have the right to take it back.

Whether whatever "Open"AI is doing is right is another question, of course. But, I don't think destroying or poisoning the commons to strike back at it is any helpful either; it feels like "destroying it to save it."

It started 40 years ago, when a man was not allowed to fix his printer. We didn't have the word enshittification at the time but even then it was understood what happens when technology abuses its users in order to enrich its creators.

Unfortunately a lot of this seems in reponse to Midori, a seemingly hostile fork with a pretty suspcious website.

To some people all forks are hostile. This appears to be such a case. He just seems to be sour over people exercising the same freedoms he got from Mozilla upstream. Rules for thee but not for me. The free software community doesn't need his obscure fork.

Not an endorsement of ExpressVPN, I've learned to avoid companies that sponsor on youtube. However, I believe you don't need the proprietary app to use the service, you could use a free software OpenVPN client such as this one.

They do offer support for OpenVPN although, unsurprisingly, they heavily push their proprietary client as the preferred way to use the service. This alone would be enough to discourage me from using it or recommending it.

I guess I'm being called out here, so wall of text incoming.

Linux and GNU are completely separate projects that have no relationship organizationally or technologically. As basic as this is, this is important to understand as the backdrop for "the GNU/Linux issue."

Linux was started in 1991 as a project to build an operating system, one that is "not as big or professional as GNU." In practical terms, Linux is just a kernel. It has no terminal, no command line tools, no desktop, no package manager, no web browser. Yet, people speak of it as if it's a fully featured operating system that contains all of those things, an alternative to Windows or macOS.

GNU was started in 1983 as a project to build an operating system, but as GNU's own kernel (the Hurd) is in development hell, the userland components (libraries and tools) are generally used with Linux to form a complete operating system, which is referred to as GNU/Linux. The "slash" is meant to signify that it's a combination of these two projects. Note that, as the GNU project has adopted the Linux-libre variant of Linux, the Hurd is no longer really a priority project.

Of course, you can have Linux without GNU (Android and Alpine are the best examples of this) and you can also run GNU on non-Linux platforms (Debian has a port that runs on the FreeBSD kernel, and the tools themselves run on any Unixy operating system and even Windows). So I don't really think you can conclude any of these are the "most important part" of the operating system, and it more or less comes down to whatever brand name you feel the most comfortable with.

And, of course, most GNU/Linux operating systems contain much more than GNU and Linux these days. Therefore, I prefer to understand Linux as a family of operating systems (as Wikipedia defines it) and GNU/Linux as a subfamily. The ironic thing is that, from a UX perspective, Linux, the kernel, is probably the least prominent component of the operating system, as it is furthest away from the user interface - but it is most prominent brand name and so gets applied to the whole "ecosystem."

A lot of Linux fans think an operating system has to have more than Linux to be a "real Linux" operating system, or that it has to be community run or "anti-corporate" or meet some ideological criteria. But, Linus himself has no such ideology, and Linux is a very corporate project. Android is the most widely used Linux operating system. It is as much "real Linux" as Debian is.

The myth of the fictional operating system called Linux naturally leads to other myths, such as the myth of fragmentation. In that sense I feel it's harmful, but the damage has been done and even the conversation around the myth has its own myths (such as the idea that Stallman wants to "rename Linux" or is jealous of Linux's popularity, that "Linux should be called GNU/Linux" because "it contains GNU" or because it was built with GNU tools or licensed under the GPL). It's hard to argue for "calling it GNU/Linux" when people don't even understand what "it" is, or even what the admittedly convoluted name is supposed to signify. So, for that reason, I don't think the "battle" is worth fighting anymore.

For the record, though, I refer to my preferred operating system by its own name, GNU Guix System, and make an effort not to center any particular project or brand name when talking about the free software community and ecosystem in general. I don't characterize myself as a fan or user of Linux, just a free software enthusiast - the fact that all of my preferred operating systems contain Linux is a consequence of the fact that Linux is the most widely used free software kernel, not because of any brand loyalty on my part. Non-Linux operating systems such as the BSD's should be considered as part of the free operating system family.

GitHub has been recognized as harmful to the free software community at least as early as 2015, years before the Microsoft acquisition. See RMS email on GitHub.

I think you'll find it is no longer "My Computer" but now "This PC"

That's debatable, since what people generally call "Linux" is more GNU than Linux anyway. "Linux" as the Linux fandom considers is it big and professional like GNU, because it is GNU (among other things).

Linux doesn't have any GNU in it. Linux is a kernel that GNU runs on top of. That's what Stallman means by "GNU/Linux."

Maybe he is a little bitter about his life's work and philosophy being erased by Linux fans, but that is understandable. Maybe he is a little too bitter.

The notion of there being underrated or overrated distros is, itself, overrated. No, there should not (and cannot) be "one distro to rule them all" because different people have different needs.

Remember that in the free software community we have the freedom to modify and share everything. Those "overrated" distros exist because someone saw a need for them, and they are widely used because other people agree. If Debian was good enough for every use case why do these other distros exist? Why doesn't everyone just use Debian?

Translation: It's proprietary "source available" software until January 2027, at which point it becomes free software and open source under the Apache 2.0 license.

Translation: "no"